Far Faster Than Years
by Willa Mitty
Summary: Of all the things that can age a man, time is far from the greatest . . . on a quiet Tatooine night, ObiWan considers the loss of his brother. Set InterTrilogy. Brotherly mushiness, but NO SLASH!


**Disclaimer:** I do not own Star Wars. Star Wars and all characters, settings, etc. portrayed therein belong George Lucas. Which, I'm sure, you already knew.

**Note:** I've already posted this story once, but when I went back and looked it over, I decided that I wasn't really happy with it, so I did a little . . . tweaking . . . and a little more tweaking . . . and now I've decided that if I don't just go ahead and post it, I may never stop tweaking, lol. I hope it's a little smoother now.

**Why I wrote this:** After watching _RotS_, it struck me just how much Obi-Wan had aged between the two trilogies. Let's face it, he was looking pretty old by the time we got to _A New Hope_, especially since he really would have only been about fifty seven or fifty eight. And fifty-some year old Obi-Wan in _ANH_ was a _lot_ older than eighty-some year old Dooku in _AotC_ and _RotS_. Here's my take on why.

And no, before I get into mushy stuff, this is not slash, lol. It's just the musings of someone who raised a child, came to care for him as a brother and a best friend, and then lost him to the demons within himself.

_**Far Faster Than Years**_

If such a place as Hell existed, then this must surely be it.

The heat was intense. It soaked into his clothes until they burned against his skin. It seeped up through the soles of his boots from the smoldering sand on which he stood. He could feel it in the burning wind that dried the sweat on his brow long before it had the chance to run down into his eyes. Ash and glowing embers fluttered through the air like dry leaves in the breeze, lazily coming to rest on his clothes, in his hair, on his beard. Steam and smoke stung his eyes and clogged his nose until he could barely see or breathe, but Obi-Wan Kenobi felt none of it; he saw none of it, because Hell was not this planet Mustafar. Hell was the broken and disfigured man who lay on the black sand before him, sliding slowly toward the burning river below.

"I hate you!" the agonized voice cried out. "I hate you! I hate you!"

"You were the Chosen One! It was said that you would destroy the Sith, not join them! Bring balance to the Force, not leave it in Darkness!" he tried to answer, but no sound came. He couldn't seem to force the words out through his unmoving lips. His stomach clinched as red-rimmed eyes glared up at him, eyes that he had once known so well.

"You were my brother, Anakin!" he screamed again into the inferno, "I loved you!" but the sound of his voice did not reach his own ears, and the figure below him shifted, grew a few years younger, and the wild eyes calmed.

"Don't say that, Master. You're the closest thing I have to a father," it said, but Obi-Wan could not move. He realized with sudden horror that all of this had happened before, that it was all happening again.

Once more the figure shifted, shrinking until it was no more than a child, an innocent little boy with innocent blue eyes. "What will happen to me now?" asked a tiny, uncertain voice. And then the little boy burst into flames.

He watched in horror as the flames caught at the edges of the little boy's severed pant legs, where his legs had once been. He watched the demon flames race up along his back to claim his shirt, and his stomach clenched again as the little boy gazed up at him helplessly, his burning hair making an eerie sort of halo around his cherubic face, and then hatred filled those innocent eyes once more. "I hate you!" he screamed in the little boy's voice, "I hate you! I hate you!"

Kenobi awoke suddenly, just as he always did at this point in the dream. He could still hear Anakin's screams ringing in his ears, could still feel the sting of burning embers brushing against his face.

_Calm_, he told himself. _Calm. Peace flows from the Force._ He latched onto that calm with both hands, just as he had done a million times before, but this time, it just wasn't enough. Mustafar's heat still blasted against his flesh in the cold desert night, and when he reached up to wipe away the sweat that had run down across his face, he found only tears.

_Calm. Peace. Let the Force flow . . ._ This time, he gained control over the panic, the sorrow, the despair, but only just.

_Dreams pass in time . . ._ the words floated back to him from his memory, but he pushed them away. He remembered speaking those words to someone once, but he didn't want to think of that now.

Taking a deep breath, he let it out again slowly and tried to get a firmer grip on his emotions. Disentangling himself from the twisted bed sheets, he set both feet on the floor and rested his sweat-dampened head in his hands. "There is no emotion," he told himself aloud, his quivering voice breaking the haunting silence of the Tatooine night, "there is peace."

He'd been having these nightmares ever since he'd arrived here on Tatooine, though over the last year or so they'd been coming less frequently. He'd hoped that these dreams were over. Apparently, they were not. Of course, in retrospect, he shouldn't be so surprised that he'd had one tonight. Hadn't he seen that report on the HoloNews just yesterday, as he'd been shopping for supplies in Anchorhead? It was old, like all news this far out, but the black clad figure that had filled the view screen had been a chilling reminder of all that Kenobi wished he could forget . . .

_Regret not. What is done is done, and undone it cannot be._

Rising, he strode to the door and stepped out into the night, letting the cold breeze dry the sweat and tears from his face. Somewhere out there in the night, little Luke slept, a sleep that was warm, peaceful, and unfettered by nightmares. _He's growing up so fast,_ Kenobi thought, calling an image of the little boy to mind, _and looking more and more like his father every day._ How much more would he look like Anakin in a few years? And how much would it hurt to look into the son's eyes and see the father?

Luke's image shifted in his mind, morphing into a far distant memory of another little boy, and an awed little voice filled his thoughts.

"_What is it, Master?"  
"Snow, Anakin. It's snow."   
"Whoa!" came the excited response. "It's cold, Master. Why is it so cold?"_

His heart cracked a little at the memory of a little boy with excited blue eyes, and he pushed it back, but before he could stop it, another took its place.

"_Anakin, I can reach the storage boxes on the top shelf, myself."  
"I'm sorry, Master," Anakin's voice answered, a touch of amusement evident in the teenager's tone, "it's not my fault that you're shorter than I am."  
"You know, young one, I can remember a time not so long ago when I was still taller than you."  
"Well, I can't be growing that fast, Master. Maybe you're just shrinking." And Anakin's mischievous laughter echoed in his ears._

And then the face shifted again, grew older, more mature, and with it came the swell of pride that always came, even now, when he thought of the little boy and of the man he had watched him grow into. Pride, and love, too. And memories of a brotherhood and a friendship so deep that its loss had left an emptiness in his soul. He could still feel the pain and the numbing disbelief he had felt when he had first looked into Anakin's eyes and seen a monster gazing back. When a nightmare had become his reality.

"_You were my brother, Anakin! I loved you!"_

_Brother,_ Kenobi thought, an echo of the tears from his nightmare stinging at the backs of his eyelids.

"_Mourn not for those who die."_ Yoda's words came back to him from his early years of tutelage under the ancient Jedi Master's teaching. "_Die, they do not, but rather transform into the Force. Miss them, do not, for always, they are with you through the Force."_ But the words brought no comfort to him now. Deep in his heart, he knew there was no merging with the Force for Anakin. There was no peaceful eternity for the little boy he had raised, for the man that little boy had become. "_Twisted by the Dark Side, young Skywalker has become. The boy you trained, gone he is. Consumed by Darth Vader."_

Consumed . . . consumed . . .

_"You are strong and wise, Anakin, and I am very proud of you. I have trained you since you were a small boy, and I have taught you everything I know, and you have become a far greater Jedi than I could ever hope to be . . ."_

Shuddering involuntarily against the cold of the desert night, Kenobi stepped back into his little house and closed the door behind him. Feeling his way through the darkness, he made his way to the 'fresher, flicked on the light, and splashed water from the basin onto his face. The chill of the water wiped away the last physical traces of his nightmare, but his heart was still heavy. Reaching for a towel, he wiped the last of the water from his eyes and gazed critically at the face that looked out from his reflection in the mirror.

_Old,_ he thought, _I'm getting old._ He remembered faintly the few gray hairs that had peeked out from his beard only a few years ago, stray and hardly noticeable hairs that Anakin had teased him about mercilessly.

"_You're getting old, Master."  
"Nonsense, Anakin. It is merely the stress of raising and training you. Each and every gray hair on my head is a gift from you," he'd answered with a a chuckle as he reached out to rest his hand on the younger man's shoulder. "And even though you are no longer my padawan, I have a feeling that you are not done putting them there."  
And Anakin had laughed along with him._

At the time, he hadn't known just how true those words would turn out to be. _Look at me now,_ he thought, _barely forty, and I'm already starting to look like Dooku._ Dooku, who'd been more than twice his age at the time . . .

Frowning, he tried to pick out a few red hairs amid the gray and white in the mirror's reflection. There weren't many to find.

"_You're getting old," echoed Anakin's voice in his memory, and for a moment, he was back in the burning remains of some war-torn battlefield, the moans and screams of injured clones mixing with the sounds of blasterfire and cannons. "You're getting too old for this, Master," came Anakin's strained and worried voice as he carried his master's bruised and bloodied body to safety. "You should give up all of this, retire to an old folk's home somewhere, get yourself a nice hover chair, and leave all of the really dangerous stuff to me." But they both knew he didn't mean it, and they could both hear the shaky terror that the teasing in Anakin's voice couldn't completely hide. "You're going to be just fine, Master," and Obi-Wan knew that Anakin was saying the words more for himself than for Obi-Wan's sake. "I'm not going to let anything happen to you. You're going to be just fine." They both knew it was a promise that, at that moment, Anakin would have given his life to keep._

And here, in the lonely silence of a Tatooine night, Kenobi admitted to himself the terrible truth, the truth that he could ignore in the light of day, the truth that pursued him relentlessly in the night. Obi-Wan Kenobi was dead. There had been no brother there to carry him out of the blistering hell of that Force-forsaken volcanic planet. His brother was gone, burned, consumed, destroyed by fiery demons until his brother's soul was no more, and only the devil known as Vader remained. And Obi-Wan Kenobi had laid himself down in the volcanic sand of Mustafar and died beside him, died beside his brother as he'd always known he would. Yes, Obi-Wan Kenobi was dead, and this old man that stared back at him from his mirror's reflection, this shell of a man who called himself Ben, was all that remained.

Blinking away the troubling thoughts, Ben turned, flicked off the 'fresher light, and headed back to his bed, but he knew that restful sleep would elude him for the remainder of this night. _Time,_ he thought, as he reached out into the peaceful sea of the Force and sought a dreamless sleep without success. _Time does not age a man. It can touch his body, but it cannot age his soul. Grief, loss, pain, regret – these are the things that pull at a man. These are the things that age a man far faster than years._

END

How'd I do? Good? Bad? Ugly? Too mushy? Thoughts?


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